HPCchain: A Consortium Blockchain System Based on CPU-FPGA Hybrid-PUF for Industrial Internet of Things

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is experiencing rapid developments in the era of Industry 4.0. However, the ever-increasing applications put forward higher requirements for authentication. Facing such a problem, researchers combine two cutting-edge techniques, i.e., physical unclonable function (PUF) and blockchain. In detail, PUF can generate multiple challenge–response pairs (CRPs) for IIoT devices by leveraging their unique physical features. Moreover, blockchain platforms are employed for storing/synchronizing CRPs, thereby resisting the single-point failure. Although realizing the unclonable authentications, the existing works ignore the device heterogeneity of IIoT and fail to develop the specified blockchain platform for supporting PUF. In this article, we present a hybrid-PUF-based consortium blockchain for IIoT authentication, named HPCchain. Specifically, we first present the notion of hybrid-PUF, which assigns different devices to generate different types of PUFs, and then employs them to play different roles in HPCchain. In this way, we can overcome the IIoT heterogeneity. Moreover, we propose the PUF-empowered credit scheme for HPCchain and realize the dynamic endorsement with which we develop a PUF-based consensus mechanism for HPCchain. Finally, we design the registration and authentication schemes for IIoT nodes, atop HPCchain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the validity of our proposals.